Daycares in Tennessee

Tennessee scores licensed daycares through the Child Care Report Card / Star-Quality Program, the state's mandatory quality rating program. The program assigns every licensed center a 1, 2, or 3 star rating (three tiers) based on a state inspection plus a quality assessment across child-staff interactions, classroom layout and use of space, health and safety practices, and age-appropriate learning activities, with trained assessors conducting classroom observations as part of the rating.

Tennessee's minimum legal requirements for adult-to-child ratios and group sizes meet the standards published by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), the leading professional accreditation body for early-childhood programs and the most widely cited benchmark for high-quality care, in the youngest age bands, but its pre-service training requirement for lead teachers is among the lightest in the country. Tennessee caps infant ratios at 1:4 (matching NAEYC) and toddler ratios at 1:6 (matching NAEYC); preschool ratios are not set as a single state rule and vary by provider. Infant and toddler group sizes match NAEYC's recommended caps of 8 and 12; preschool group sizes vary by provider. The state does not set a single rule on lead-teacher credentials. State-required pre-service training for lead teachers is 22 hours, well below NAEYC's recommended 2,080, and required ongoing professional development is 12 hours per year, below NAEYC's recommended 25.

These minimum legal requirements apply to every licensed daycare in Tennessee, regardless of its Star-Quality rating. They are one of the Structural inputs in every Childery rating shown above. The rating distribution above combines that Structural input with Star-Quality scores and other Process inputs to produce the Overall scores. For the full breakdown, see the Tennessee methodology page.